Koko to help question Maharlika bill before SC

MANILA, Philippines — As the Maharlika Investment Fund (MIF) bill edges closer to becoming a law, Senate Minority Leader Aquilino Pimentel III said yesterday he is ready to help anyone fight the controversial measure on possibly the last battlefront – the Supreme Court (SC).

“I reiterate my readiness to help those who will question this before the Supreme Court. I will help them with the facts and documents in their arguments,” Pimentel said over radio dwIZ.

He said that by tampering with the enrolled bill, the Senate leadership had only provided critics of the measure with more ammunition to challenge it before the SC.

“Other issues that could be raised is that we don’t have surplus or windfall profit for a wealth fund, that it is not ideal in the light of geopolitical tensions and that this was railroaded. These are the grounds to question the MIF law, and now we have another argument – that the enrolled bill set to be signed into law by the President was tampered with,” Pimentel said.

He was referring to the Senate majority’s move to merge Sections 50 and 51 – which included two periods of prescription for crimes and offenses – and retain the 10-year period instead of 20, long after the Senate bill was approved on third and final reading and adopted by the House of Representatives.

An approved bill can only be altered of its grammatical and typographical errors.

It was the bill’s sponsor Sen. Mark Villar who wrote to the Senate leadership to request for the corrections in the enrolled bill, which was later signed by Senate President Juan Miguel Zubiri even while on a working visit to Washington.

Pimentel said the Senate leadership violated the Constitution when it tampered with an approved bill, which could only be amended when remanded back to plenary, or supplanted with an amendatory bill that would go through the same legislative process.

The former Senate President cited a bill during the 1990s that was brought back to plenary for amendment just to change the auxiliary verb “is” into the plural “are.”

“And that went through the process, through the plenary of both houses of Congress. Changing the bill just for the economy of words is totally against the rules and the Constitution,” Pimentel said.

Among the other possible constitutional issues raised against the MIF bill are the President’s urgent certification of the measure in the absence of a public emergency or calamity, and the failure to prove the proposed fund’s economic viability.

The leadership should have allowed the enrolled bill with conflicting provisions to be transmitted to Malacañang untouched instead of tampering with it and making things worse, Pimentel explained.

“And when it is brought back to Congress, we can talk about the amendments and the lessons learned from rushing such an important proposal,” Pimentel said.

On an earlier statement that tampering with an approved bill is tantamount to falsification of legislative documents – punishable under the Revised Penal Code with prison terms and a P1.2-million fine – Pimentel said the elements of crime should be established first.

“We have that provision in the Revised Penal Code, but let us first study the elements of the crime. I can’t make a categorical statement yet, that this was violated. But what is clear here is that the bill was tampered with,” Pimentel said in Filipino.

“The question is: When was this tampered with, and who did it? We are sure that the changes were not made during the Senate session. This remains a big mystery,” he added.

Questionable

Two experts on law and economics also said the corrected MIF bill is still rigged with irregularities and does not serve its purpose of attracting investments.

In an interview with The Chiefs on OneNews Friday night, legislative and policy consultant Michael Henry Yusingco said there are solid grounds to question the constitutionality of the MIF bill with the SC.

He said that while lawmakers may claim to have only made “stylistic changes” or corrected “clerical errors” in the measure, they had actually “changed a substantive element in the provision which is the years of prescription.”

“The changes that were made are tantamount to an amendment and should not have been allowed because … the rule is very clear. The Constitution is very clear that after the third reading, no amendment shall be allowed,” he added.

Worse, he added, the “substantive changes” were even made by the secretariat and not by lawmakers themselves.

“They (secretariat) are not allowed to do so. Even if you say that that was the intent of the plenary, the fact that there are several lawmakers questioning that should weaken that argument,” he pointed out.

He added a “remedy” that Congress should have made was to send back the MIF bill to the plenary so that legislators could fix the measure.

Yusingco also questioned the constitutionality of Senate President Juan Miguel Zubiri’s signing the final copy of the MIF bill at the Philippine embassy in Washington and the senators from the majority bloc discussing it through their Viber group chat.

But the lawyer clarified that the enrolled bill should be questioned before the high tribunal after its being signed and enacted into law by President Marcos.

“The unconstitutionality will lie in the fact that the amendment was made after the third reading, so that is the violation. The violation occurred even before the President signed it into law and therefore that makes the law unconstitutional,” he pointed out.

Filomeno Sta. Ana, coordinator of non-governmental organization Action for Economic Reforms, said the MIF bill does not serve its purpose, which is to attract investors.

“Maharlika is not really clear what it wants to do. And I think even the investors, both local and foreign, are confused,” he maintained.

He said the MIF is “redundant” with other existing government agencies such as Land Bank of the Philippine (LBP), Board of Investments and National Development Company.

“Don’t you have existing bodies for such … Why get funds from government financial institution and fund Maharlika which will essentially be doing what these institutions are doing,” he added.

He also said that based on some provisions of the bill and on business proposal of government economists, MIF is a “sovereign wealth fund.”

This means that the funds would be used by the Maharlika Investment Corp. to “make the funds grow.” But this is on the premise that MIF would be financed by spare funds that the government does not have in the first place.

Sta. Ana said funds to be drawn from LBP, Development Bank of the Philippines and dividends from the the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas are “not exactly excess funds.”

“There’s no problem with Maharlika, but it’s not the role of the government. The government can only do it if it has excess funds,” he said in Filipino.